'HR on the Rocks' - An Excerpt

From Episode 1: A Day in the Life

The HR office resembles a shrine to corporate purgatory—a fluorescent-lit wasteland where hope fades between the pages of policy manuals. At 8:15 AM sharp, the morning ritual begins. Not with prayer or meditation, but with another day’s bureaucratic onslaught, delivered as paper stacks and digital nightmares that breed faster than workplace gossip.

The lights flicker overhead, a Morse code of institutional despair. Policy manuals often sit unused, gathering dust. Their spines crack from neglect because few people read them until after they have broken the rules.

Maggie enters the HR department with the determined stride of someone who’s been to war and expects to find more casualties today. She doesn’t just walk in—she storms in, her sensible heels striking the linoleum with percussive precision. Each step broadcasts her arrival like a timpani announcing the entrance of something formidable. Twenty years in Human Resources have left her with the knowing look of someone who’s heard every workplace excuse and believes very few.

Her blazer—navy blue, not black, because that would be too obvious a metaphor for her soul—hangs a bit off-kilter on shoulders that have carried the weight of a thousand termination meetings. Since the great harassment policy overhaul of 2017, she has kept her hair pulled back in a functional knot during office hours. Her lips form a perpetually crooked line of disinterest, carefully calibrated to convey professionalism without the liability of actual emotion.

In her arms rests the physical manifestation of today’s torment: a stack of compliance briefs so thick they might qualify as weight training. The tower of paper teeters dangerously, held together by the sheer force of Maggie’s contempt and three struggling binder clips. This stack represents the latest regulatory updates—a quarterly routine as certain as tax season and as delightful as food poisoning.

She could have read everything digitally, the glare of a screen staring back at her for hours, but her eyes had already dried up and glossed over too many times, so now she was stuck with paper. Appropriate considering paper, like so many regulations, is outdated and unnecessary.

She slams the stack onto her desk. The sound reverberates through the office like a gunshot, causing a junior HR associate to spill coffee on his shirt. Nobody offers sympathy. This is HR—emotional trauma comes with the territory.

End of Excerpt